Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @06:15PM
from the what-is-this-blank-text-field-for dept.

PerlJedi writes "Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have conducted a very simple study, with some surprising (or at least amusing) results about how our short term memory works. Quoting: 'Sometimes, to get to the next object the participant simply walked across the room. Other times, they had to walk the same distance, but through a door into a new room. From time to time, the researchers gave them a pop quiz, asking which object was currently in their backpack. The quiz was timed so that when they walked through a doorway, they were tested right afterwards. As the title said, walking through doorways caused forgetting: Their responses were both slower and less accurate when they'd walked through a doorway into a new room than when they'd walked the same distance within the same room.'"

Alex Trebek: Good evening and welcome to another edition of "Open the Door Jeopardy" where contestants must step through a door after ringing in and answer because answering a 'clue' in the form of a question just isn't confusing enough. Ken Jennings, as our returning champion you start. Ken Jennings: I'll start with the category 'I Confess!' for $400, Alex. Alex Trebek: Very good... 'His death and subsequent disagreement of heir resulted in the Battle of Hastings.' *Ken Jennings rings in, opens the door and steps through it*Ken Jennings: Um... uh... um... I knew it a second ago. Alex Trebek: Ooooh, I'm sorry, time is up. Anyone else? *the heavy treads of IBM's Watson machine crush the door as it rolls in*Watson: Who was Edward the Confessor?

So many famous quotes talk about the gravity of "walking through that door", about the hope of "opening a new door" or "closing a door...opening a window" that I wonder how much people associate doors metaphorically with permission to forget and ignore everything on the other side?

Of course, ancient Greeks used architecture, specifically an image of a large house, to remember things: a common technique to plan and memorize a speech was to lay it out visually in your head, each room representing a major topic and each door perhaps representing a transition or gravid point. So architecture as memory cuts both ways.

I did not know this and will try this technique the next time I have to give a speech. Are you supposed to start in the basement or the attic? Probably doesn't matter. I just hope I don't fall down the stairs.

Not exclusively an architecture thing. This Simonides guy [mnemotechnics.org] came up with a systematic way of associating arbitrary facts with spatial memory.

Excerpt: Legend says that Simonides of Ceos was the inventor of the method of loci where large amounts of data can be remembered in order by placing images that represent the data into mental locations or journeys.

The story goes there was a building collapse at a dinner party, killing everyone but Simonides (who had stepped out to receive a messenger). Anyway, the bodies were unidentifiably crushed but Simonides was able to identify the victims based on where they had been sitting.
Interesting in that it uses spatial memory, something humans are pretty good at, to associate ar

Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.

It's one of the reasons why I've always insisted upon having at least one guaranteed-uninterrupted (nothing short of "the building's on fire... again") two-hour block of time per day in any tech job I have. If I don't have that, don't complain to me that I write bad code, but DO expect me to gripe about it in my status and my supervisor evaluation.

Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.

While that is true, it does nothing to diminish the weirdness of this result. Walking from one place to another doesn't seem like much of a "change of context." Especially when your present location has utterly nothing to do with what you're trying to remember.

Weirdness, I don't get it. Walking through a doorway involves a lot of quick sensory work eating away at caches and main memory. These instinctual kernel processes take precedent to user-land thought processes. An obvious survival technique.

Oh hell yeah. Is the door pull or push? Can I lift the handle, or do I have to push it down?

And don't even get me started on automatic doors. You need differential calculus to walk through them properly: is the door going to be wide enough open for me to get through it at my present speed, given a low threshold of detection, or am I going to pull a Bieber and smash my face into it?

When you walk into a new scene, your brain performs a series of high-priority tasks to update your current situational map. It would be counter to your survival success to ignore new sensory and context information presented by rounding a corner or entering a cave, especially if that sensory information included such things a predators. Even if what you were pondering as you entered the new scene was, for instance, a very innovative way to knap and flake a stone axe that would really impress the Cro-Magnon chicks. Your pre-historic geek-trance will kill you if you wander all unawares into a cave bear den.

As a high-priority background task, this situational integration would preempt cognitive resources, such as forcing a cache dump of short-term memory to populate with new page tables, as it were.

What I find fascinating is that all these processes happen and we don't even know it.

You could ask the guy why he hesitated in his answers and it wouldn't be "Well, my cache got wiped when my environment-mapper interrupt fired". You could probe farther, "What were you thinking about when you first walked through the door?" and you still wouldn't get anything. These processes never enter our conscious mind unless the process finds something (perhaps a bear-shaped shadow in the corner) which needs immediate

If you're interested in this, read the book Buyology by Martin Lindstrom. HE did tests how effective marketing/commercials/.. are for decision making using brain scans/eeg/...Seems most decisions are made instant by our unconscious, and only (milliseconds) later our conscious mind tries to 'explain' why we made a specific decision.

This makes me wonder if standing near the doorway where you can see both rooms would alter the results. If you move into a subset of the visible space, do you have to think all over again or do you move into a subset in your brain?

I can't argue, but I do notice I think very differently in different physical spaces. I find I can solve coding architecture tasks better if I go for a walk outdoors, for example. Sitting in front of my computer seems to be better for detail-oriented work. So while I don't really understand how the brain works, and I wouldn't have guessed the results if you'd asked me beforehand, they do make intuitive sense to me. Changing spaces affects cognition.

You have to context switch from walkToObject(environment, objectLocation) to avoidObstacles(environment, perceptionFilters). Yeah avoidObstacles() is just a function call, but it's a processor-intensive one and it has higher priority.

Switching contexts is computationally expensive for our brains, and is a lossy procedure. Any techie can tell you that constant interruptions cause bad code because you lose context and the "gestalt" of what you are doing.

In fact, it's a little more subtle than that.What is expensive is not switching contexts, as you can check by reading 2 web pages simultaneously, it's pretty easy.

But your performance degrades a lot when you try to multitask with your two cerebral hemispheres (for example computing and drawing at the same time).

Also, when you have similar tasks, you have an internal limit, and you can easily store tasks that fit within your limit.When a task is closed, you'll forget it immediately, to free space for an incoming task.

The fact is, when you walk into a new room you are seriously distracted. You are taking in the new sights, furniture arrangements, etc... As you say, it requires quite a bit of processing. I am not in the least surprised that they would temporarily "forget" something else.

I bet the would get exactly the same results if they sneakily popped a balloon or dropped a metal pan right behind the subject, creating a loud noise, and tested them immediately

My wife's family is tri-lingual and they will sometimes incorporate all three languages into a single sentence. When I point out that they've done this, they claim they didn't notice they were doing it.

I noticed the same thing. I don't really speak the languages, but I studied Spanish and German in school. The only way I was able to learn the languages was to think in those languages, and then it was completely natural. But the cost of that is, as you mention, when shifting languages. You have to manually translate whatever the concepts of the topic at hand are into the new language, which uses up some of your working memory.

Linguists hate it because in its strongest sense it is trivially false (people can obviously think about things they don't have preexisting symbols for), and in it's weakest sense it is trivially true (connotations of words and grammatical assumptions do influence how people think about things). In other words, it's not a particularly useful or explanatory concept. It's either a statement of the obvious, or just wrong, depending on how strongly you state the case.

There is a lot of truth to that. Conference rooms mean boredom to me so my brain loads the boredom context. If I need to say anything meaningful I need to bring notes. My cube (now just desk) is a place where I work and my brain loads my work context. It doesn't amaze me at all that the more we learn about the brain and effective software design, the more similar the 2 become.

I would think this is due to the brain first checking the next room. It being a new place, we probably want to be well aware of the room before being too far in. Thus our attention is taken away from whatever we are thinking about a minute ago.

What's particularly interesting is that it's not just the act of moving into a new (and unknown) room, but the act of moving into a different room than the one you were just in, even if that other room is one with which you're already familiar. In other words, it's not the newness, but the shift.

My understanding is yes. In part, the other room may have a load of other things forgotten that the brain now views as a priority, because your immediate surroundings take precedent to a thought connected to now remote surroundings (the other room).

I frequently find distraction breaks my thread of thought and I lose the frayed thread end. Rather like going up stairs - "Uh. What did I come up here for?" Go downstairs - "Uh. What did I come down here for?" I've been doing this ever since I spent 20 minutes searching my parents house for the screwdriver I was holding in my hand all the time - I was about 12 years old at the time - I'm an expert in this field!

I could see how that would be a survival instinct. When you cross a barrier into another space, job one for your brain is taking stock of where you are and processing possible threats. It's not that you forget what you have in your hand, your brain has merely busy with another set of priorities.

When our ancestors moved from the cover of the woods to a grassy meadow, when they entered a cave, or rounded the bend of a river they were effectively going through a door to another space. The surviving human brains would have been attuned to both threats and opportunities, which would be a priority processing task kicked off by crossing the barrier threshold.

I could see how that would be a survival instinct. When you cross a barrier into another space, job one for your brain is taking stock of where you are and processing possible threats. It's not that you forget what you have in your hand, your brain has merely busy with another set of priorities.

When our ancestors moved from the cover of the woods to a grassy meadow, when they entered a cave, or rounded the bend of a river they were effectively going through a door to another space. The surviving human brains would have been attuned to both threats and opportunities, which would be a priority processing task kicked off by crossing the barrier threshold.

"When our ancestors moved from the cover of the woods to a grassy meadow, when they entered a cave, or rounded the bend of a river they were effectively going through a door to another space. The surviving human brains would have been attuned to both threats and opportunities, which would be a priority processing task kicked off by crossing the barrier threshold."

Maybe this is why talking/texting on a cell phone while driving is dangerous. The person is essentially straddling a threshold between two spaces-

... And I find that at least half the time, I can mentally retrieve whatever it was I was thinking of by going to the last spot I was in where I am certain I remembered it or was thinking about it, and then physically going through the motions of whatever it was that I was doing there last time, be it sitting down, walking in a particular direction, or what have you.

I do that simply because I set down something important and have to go figure out where I left it.

I had one cow worker who would lose their coffee cup in the warehouse once a month. I would simply walk the warehouse searching at hand level, elbow, and shoulder level until i found it. They set it down at a conveient height and walked off without it.

sometimes I do forget a singular items off a large list of material that I quickly memorized. however by walking ba

It is well known that when learning a new dance step, it is much easier to keep the room in the same orientation when rehearsing it. One gets particularly confused trying the step facing another direction before the step begins to be committed to muscle memory. Dancers call it "room memory" [wikipedia.org].

Forgetting is a very important skill -- it's a big huge part of something that we call focus.

With the exception of completely arbitrary doors, I'd argue that every door our there separates two head-spaces for a damn good reason.

The experiment that you want to do next is to see if crossing back through the doorway re-strengthens the original memory. I would hope that it not only restrengthens the original memory, but that the original memory winds up being stronger after returning through the door (that's t

Some people are better at this and some better at that. I couldn't find numbers mentioned in the scientist article, only that "Memory was worse", not how much worse, in whatever sense, for how many people, for which people, etc.

In the first place, this has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks, in the form of the memorization technique known as the "method of loci." Rhetoricians memorized their speeches by associating each part of the speech with a room in their house, and as they gave the speech would mentally walk through the house. This is in fact the source of our expressions "in the first place," "in the second place," etc.

No doors.
When I run my business I want my employees to be ahead of the game. Everything will be open to everyone all the time. There will be no 4 sided objects or anything that even resemble a doorway in fact. My employees will be the best!
On an unrelated note, anyone know of an open field for sale in Kansas?

And the door is triple sized so the blind doesn't even know he walked through a door. What if it's a normal size door and he felt that he walked through something but being blind from birth, the door concept must have been real different from us.

Are they better at remembering things?

What if they change the experiment to automatic doors, glass vs. wood, etc. It'd be interesting.

If this research is validated, then there may be implications for UI design...

Gnome 3, for example, works using an application space focus, rather than a window focus. In one way that's quite appealing - it gives you full focus on the task at hand without the distraction of the 12 other programs you are running at the same time. The problem that lots of people have reported/commented on is that it makes it very difficult to be task focused when a task involves more than one program. Part of this may be to do with the doorway context switch impeding short term memory retention on the task at hand.

I've used Gnome 3 as an example, but it's far from alone; Metro & Apple full-screen apps spring to mind, though there's a mitigation with Apple full-screen in that it's not forced upon you.

I wonder if there's a way to enjoy the focus of application-centricity without the disadvantages? For instance, I can imagine keeping a map of the other applications visible, or a representation of the overall desktop/workspace, as you move th'rough the doorway between applications, and/or as you work in an application space. (Slashdot, you may want to vote this up so that it isn't deleted when this item is archived, so that there's some evidence of prior art when large megacorp tries to patent this UI idea.)

Something like that might be enough to jog short term memory and stop the context loss.

Or of course, we could decide that window centric works best, but work on ways to easily group windows into tasks.

Workspaces/Desktops are one way to accomplish this. The problem that I find with workspaces is that they are a clumsy way to manage tasks when I have an application that spans different tasks. But on the other hand, actively managing windows by marking and grouping them introduces unwelcome management overhead.

I would welcome a system whereby windows and applications were grouped together, either automatically or on the cue of the user, by virtue of the fact that they had been used together. (Again - oh no megacorp! - more prior art! ) For instance, one embodiment of this might be to group windows or applications based on the transfer of info between them. Cut and paste for example shows a transfer of info, and could be used as an indicator of affinity.

The story goes that at the height of the cold war DARPA was working on some machine language translation software. English to Russian and Russian to English. When the felt that they had finally got it right they set the system up to take a phrase in English, translate it to Russian, and then translate that back to English to see how closely the phrases matched.

The first researcher stepped up to the console and typed in: "Out of sight, out of mind."The computer returned: "An invisible lunatic."

It's a koan post. You're supposed to contemplate it, discover your inner peace, meditate, ask yourself the same question you asked of others, and become either enlightened or so frustrated you burn your master's straw hut down and evict him from the universe. What you discover about this one word will reveal much about the universe.

Short term memory is based on neurophysiology of the brain. That's not going to change that much over just a couple decades. Now, the amount of stress that we feel as a result of constantly paging between things would elicit that sort of response. And it's been studied, not conclusively yet, but multitasking is bad.

Doesn't seem like it's doorways or line of sight, but changing rooms is like turning a new page in ones mind. New room, new collection of objects, new page of memory to work with.

That's how I feel it works in my own mind in any case.

Hundreds of processes happen, going from one room to another. Identifying the door is a good start (walls are so unyielding) looking for the knob, using hand-eye coordination to put hand on doorknob, turn, sense door opens or does not, pulling, pushing, how far is door open, don't hit it going through, see objects in new room, processes information (I didn't walk out into space and plummet like Wile E. Coyote, etc.) then resume walking, assuming you know what you came in for.

Probably at some point they'll use this as a screen for Alzheimers Disease (or early onset dementia.)

I'd argue that taking stock of the new room is the biggest of those distractors. There's a lot involved when you have to take stock of "new" territory, and it'd be pretty easy for that to distract you. Even if you're familiar with the room, it takes a moment to verify things are as you left them. We're not all that far removed from needing to figure out if there's something waiting to eat us around every corner.

Besides, I feel quite confident that when in a building, my brain clearly believes all floors are flat and ergo no processing to determine such. My proof is the number of small steps I've kicked and lumps I've tripped over. Not quite so instantaneously my brain first questions how this floor cannot be flat, I then become pissed off that I am no longer moving as I had intended and that my foot hurts, then my brain justifies it (accurately or not), and only then am I able to instinctively take action and pr

Ha ha! In my case I'm in rural Colorado, actually, where we still have bears and mountain lions which often aren't a direct threat to people, but which do cause a little trouble now and then. A co-worker has had a bear in his house, one of my wife's co-workers has pictures of a mountain lion resting in her back yard about a foot from the house.

The black widow spiders don't compare to anything in Australia, but they've occasionally gotten into our house, so I'm often looking out for them, and while I've n

Hundreds of processes happen, going from one room to another. Identifying the door is a good start (walls are so unyielding) looking for the knob, using hand-eye coordination to put hand on doorknob, turn, sense door opens or does not, pulling, pushing, how far is door open, don't hit it going through...

In the experiment, the doors were opened for the subject. Additional doors that were not part of their planned path were kept closed, so they hardly had to think about where to go next, just follow the automatically opening doors. Also, the first part of the experiment was conducted entirely using a first-person video game, so the only actions required by the subject were most likely holding down the "W" key while moving the mouse left and right.

Thank you. I signed in just to say this very same thing, and boom! there you are. Context is important in even short-term memory. The simplest explanation of course is that the presence of the original context provides a rich set of retrieval cues.

Context is king in memory. It both helps and hinders. Memories are linked to the place and time where you first learned them. The brain is like a 3 dimensional chording keyboard combined with a hologram combined with photographic film. If you've only seen something once, you'll remember the context. As you see that thing more and more, the context/background gets washed out and all that remains is the pattern of the image/concept. So if you are told to remember the words "fish, piano, disestablishmentarianism, Arizona, and tooth", you are going to tie that pattern to the context you are in. Change the context and it becomes harder to remember.

I wonder if it's cheating to "play back" your conversation with the person who gave you the list?

It should probably also be noted that context is very important in data compression, and it doesnt seem unreasonable that brains have evolved to store information efficiently using some of the strategies that we have found successful in compsci.

Frank Lloyd Wright exploited this phenomenon in his architecture. If you're familiar with his "compression and release", you're probably also familiar with how dumbstruck a person can get walking into one of his buildings. http://goo.gl/H6ygK [goo.gl]

It doesn't matter where you are. The phenomenon is that when you move through a doorway that you have some subconscious trigger to forget (you are somewhere else, no need to remember anymore), not that being where you learned something makes you more likely to remember.

The phenomenon is that when you move through a doorway that you have some subconscious trigger to forget (you are somewhere else, no need to remember anymore)

This, as well as the original post, are so completely false in logic that I can't even begin to describe it. Ok I will try to begin though.

Of course, people who would be in an experiment, and would go through a door, would have different short term management than those who don't. Going through a door requires some calculations: opening it, closing it, the surprise of the environment of the next room, the risk of walking through the door (what lies beyond is somewhat random before you open the door/cros

I haven't read the study, but the details in TFA are insufficient to gauge what is meant by a door. They call it "walking through a doorway" not "operating a door" or such. So the issue is walking into a new room, not operation of a door.

I haven't read the study, but the details in TFA are insufficient to gauge what is meant by a door. They call it "walking through a doorway" not "operating a door" or such. So the issue is walking into a new room, not operation of a door.

It doesn't really matter, the subconscious effects of preparing yourself to go into a new room, anticipating possible dangers and so on (as mentioned above in a post) are the same. The physical opening of a door isn't the crucial thing.

Could this be because they're "inside their heads", daydreaming? Other posters have already mentioned the old technique for memorizing things by visualizing locations and that obviously works. So if I'm a visual thinker then does that mean I intuitively carry around the context in my imagination? And would experience a "context switch" when having to switch focus to my surroundings whereas other people might be less prone to interruption by outside stimuli but more sensitive to the external context?

Possibly, they should run an experiment where some people are asked a really simple and well-introduced question by someone who walks up to them in the first room ("Hi, I'm Jim, and I'm just going to ask you a simple question, what color is grass?"), and then others are asked the question immediately by the person who is standing behind the door to the second room ("Opening door...WHOA there's somebody right here!" - "What color is grass?"). If the reaction times are much longer for the second group then it